/ forgottenweapons
The Tucker & Sherrard (and later Sherrard & Clark) is one of the more interesting Texas Confederate revolvers. The company initially was granted a contract with the Texas state government to provide 100 revolvers per month at $50 each, and took a total of $10,000 of investment capital from the state to start up their operation. However, aside from a few initial samples they never managed to deliver any guns to the state.
What appears to have been happening was that they were making guns, but selling them out the back door to private individuals, because the guns would easily bring $100 on the open market thanks to the arms shortages of the Confederacy. In the meantime, the company was delivering a whole series of excuses to Texas about why there were no deliveries - unavailable materials, conscripted workers, and fears of national CSA agents confiscating the guns. Texas finally had enough of this, and dissolved the contract, requiring the company to repay its seed capital with interest. Thanks to the serious inflation plaguing the Confederate currency, though, the repaid amount was only worth about half of its initial value.
This particular Tucker & Sherrard is one of the "low hammer" models, which handles much better than a standard Dragoon pattern revolver. Only three of these are known to exist (serial numbers 52, 54, and 56), and they seem to have been an experiment by the company for purposes unknown.
/ forgottenweapons